


Where There Is Smoke

by ashdalbo



Category: Original Work
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Canon Gay Relationship, Canon LGBTQ Character, Canon Lesbian Relationship, Enemies, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, LGBT, LGBTQ Female Character, Slow Burn, wlw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 07:48:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30102642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashdalbo/pseuds/ashdalbo
Summary: Sage has only ever known peace and family. When her life goes up in flames she trades flowers for hidden daggers.Erra has grown up in violence. When he father is assassinated she must learn the true cost of responsibility.The scholar leaves her library. The hunter becomes the hunted. But, there are forces stronger than revenge in every world.
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi welcome to my story! Comments and kudos are much appreciated. Hope you enjoy :)

The girl with the flower had never run so fast in her entire life.

She had felt the violence of wind before as it whipped through her chestnut hair. She had seen the chase of a hundred birds of prey. She had herself released an arrow from a bow and felt the sting on her cheek that marked the acceleration of the deadly bolt. But these were nothing compared to the way she moved now.

The quality of adrenaline that makes it so effective is its refusal be felt in fractions. When the rush hits, it hits with absolution- taking priority over every sense, every nerve, every feeling. And the adrenaline had hit Sage Kiran only minutes ago. Consciousness gave way to epinephrine with a humble curtsy as she tore through the trees. She was the harshest breeze, the starving hunter, the arrow that had finally been granted its sweet release. Her heart was beating with an intensity that might otherwise seem concerning, but Sage wouldn't notice this. Nor would she notice the surface of her soft flesh being ripped open by low-hanging branches, or the sharp stab of her too-long fingernails digging into her own palm, which gripped the stem of the snowdrop as if it were the tangible embodiment of her own life.

The girl with the flower was screaming.

Later, she would wonder why the trees had not quivered and fallen against the power of her voice. In fact, she would wonder how she had managed to breathe at all with the extent and ferocity of her cries. But of course, this is another miraculous feat of evolution brought to effect by the adrenaline rush; the expansion of the air passages to the lungs.

For now, though, all she could focus on was not loosening her grip on the flower and moving her stupidly slow feet faster than she had known they would allow. Suddenly, or as suddenly as the anticipation harvested by two decades worth of familiarity can allow the trees around her disappeared and the girl was standing at the edge of a vast clearing. From the treeline, the ground gave way almost vertically and the forest was replaced with a pit of around twenty feet in depth.

Despite its geographical veracity, the word pit does a disservice to all that Pember Hollow was. The village did not exist within the hole, but rather they were one and the same thing. The houses below were constructed with the same packed earth from which they erupted. Trees fell away at the craters edge only to be rediscovered in the framework of every architectural feature within. The moss that grew from the bank so too could be found spreading like a fungus across the tops of the single-level dwellings that lined the streets, and whose roofs came to a flat peak all at the same height and all mere inches above ground level itself. If Sage were bigger or stronger and possessed the ambition, she could dig to the mantle of the earth directly below her feet and find the same rock that paved each narrow street below. 

Every tight alleyway, all sixteen of them, spread radially like a spiders first delicate web from the centre of the hollow to its almost perfectly circular edge. It was at this centre, where each gently sloping pathway combined into an open but cosy courtyard, that a fountain would be found- the only structure that exposed the village as its being unnatural. From far enough above, however, the trickle of water which bubbled politely over the octagon of green marble could be mistaken simply as an animated puddle. The gaps between the huts would present themselves as shadows rather than pavements and the birds that soared perpetually above it saw Pember Hollow not as a civilisation, but a jagged, uneven meadow whose populates lived and breathed seemingly within the earth itself.

The girl with the flower was home.

She held the prize to her chest, finding comfort in its fragility and accomplishment in the sounds of the leather-clad feet tapping stone that drifted on the breeze from the crevice below. This was the moment when the one she was running from caught up with her. Their bodies collided like a wave slapping a stagnant rock as he crashed into her from behind. Bigger, stronger, older; there was nothing she could do to push the boy off when he pinned her down.

"Get off, Tion!" She cried, writhing against the spongey floor until she was kicking up dirt.

"Let it go!" He wrestled at her hands. 

"No!"

She would ignore the suffocating pressure of his weight on her abdomen and the sharp stab of his knees in her ribs. She would never release the flower. She would die with it clasped in her clammy hands as they lowered her down to be eaten by worms. That is, until he gripped her arm, digging his thumb into the soft flesh of her wrist just below the palm. She was as powerless against the reflex as the snowdrop is the spring. Her fingers stretched open in bloom and the white crown fell to the dust where it was swiftly scooped up.

The boy jumped off and Sage leaned up frustratedly on her elbows.

"Not fair, I've been watching it for weeks waiting for the bloom. You only found it because you were stalking me." She complained, still pouting from the floor.

"It's survival of the fittest, Sage. You used your talents and I used mine, fair and square. Would you have the deer run themselves into extinction because they can't synthesize the sun rather than chew on some weeds?"

She had no response. She hated his reasonings and the strength with which they appealed to her. 

"You're an absolute mongrel, do you know that?"

"And you're a pathetic gardener with magical, green fingers but toes made out of concrete."

Sage huffed and stood up, angry because she knew her brother was right. She had come across the patch of grass in the woods almost three weeks ago and immediately recognised the promise it held. Moss cannot support flora the way grass does, and Sage knew this. So, when the shoot appeared, Sage had snuck out every night to tend to it and whisper words of encouragement. 

For the two most recent days she spent almost every possible second at that spot in the forest waiting for the little white head to escape its vegetative cocoon. The whole time she had been so engrossed in giving the fragile bud her undivided love and attention, she hadn't noticed the figure watching cunningly from the undergrowth. The girl may be smart, but her brother was clever. He had pounced as soon as she had resolved to pick the snowdrop.

As the pair rose and descended the cast iron ladder that would lower them to the level of the village, Sage complained some more and argued with a sort of mischievous enthusiasm that lacks any real regard. If this was anyone else, perhaps she might have cared more about the theft. But Sage had grown up to be like everyone else in the village. 

Creative, her father, who specialised in transcription, would praise. Intelligent, her translative mother might add with a conviction she believed, but distrusted. She was all of these words she had heard all her life whose incessant repetition in the most mundane places divests them of all good intention. Sage knew what she was. She knew she was boring. More importantly though, she knew that her brother was not.

Tion had always felt restricted by the steep walls of Pember the way Sage had felt their comfort. When Sage looked at her future, she saw the life that her parents had lived. She saw her children running through the streets whose blueprint could be found in the muscle memory of her own feet. She could look at everything she had ever experienced and know that she would see little more, but she had always anticipated this quiet existence with patient sort of pleasure.

When Sage looked at Tion's future, she didn't see his past or his present. She didn't see anything at all. It was colourful and it was bright, but it was as non-conforming as a drifting cloud: Evaporating and condensing into different shapes with every passing second. She did not know in what direction he would float, but she knew that she would be applauding him from the ground.

It was not that Sage was unhappy with herself, but she did sometimes wish that she were not so easily satisfied. In all honesty, she was jealous without resentment that she was not him, and yet she lacked the capacity to feel anything but good things towards him. So instead, she admired her brother with an unspoken idolisation that she would deny to anyone who suspected the extent of her devotion, this usually being herself. 

In such a way, she marvelled wordlessly at the way the cobblestones were rendered speechless under his poised feet as he strolled along ahead of her. A jaguar who has never understood the meaning of the word prey, emitting a kind of self-assurance that she herself had never entertained. 

"Will you take it straight to the Grandmaster?" She asked, hopping where he loped through the winding streets. 

"I think so. It will start to get dark soon and if we are to have the feast tonight, she'll need to make the announcement soon. Will you come with me?" Tion asked as they walked.

Sage's chest swelled embarrassingly at the invitation, but she was not sure she could watch her brother accept a glory that she had spent weeks envisioning for herself.

"I can't, I have some transcriptions I should finish before the feast or I'll never get them done."

"Please?" He persisted as they approached the point of divergence. 

The courtyard was empty except for a trio of children leaning over the edge of the fountain, giggling together as they ran their stubby fingers through the chill of its silvery depths. They scattered like mice at the arrival of the older siblings, leaving the two alone. The only part of the cavity that was not enclosed by houses, the court was always brighter than the rest. In its depth, darkness fell early in the hollow, and with consequence. Lanterns would need to be lit to illuminate the streets, the vaults would be evacuated of workers and sealed for safety overnight. Sunset was a luxury to be admired only by those free to wander the village without responsibility, which seemed tonight to be only two. 

"I shouldn't, thar." She replied affectionately, basking in the flickering dance of shadows, "besides, it's your honour alone to claim. I would only be background noise. Unnecessary distraction."

"Okay," he kicked his feet absentmindedly against the fountains wall, "will you tell our parents, then? I want them to know it was us when they hear the gong."

"Of course," She promised. 

"Thanks, little fore." He squeezed her shoulder affectionately before turning north, up one of the main four streets whose ladder would lead to the main access road, along which the Grandmaster's isolated cabin could be found.

Across the courtyard, on the edge of the fading light he stopped and turned. Sage waved passively, encouragingly. Her brother's feet ground against the rocky floor for a second before he called:

"The forest is eery in silence, background noise is what makes it magical. The world would be unbearable without it." The compliment was solemn and foreign on his tongue. 

He did not give her time to reply, he had disappeared into the spidery maze before the redness crept to her cheeks. Later, she would curse him for his efficiency, for denying her the opportunity to return the affections that she had suppressed for all of their childhood. In the moment, she only laughed at his uncommon vulnerability and turned south towards home. 

Sage arrived at her front door at the same time as her parents, just returning from the closing of the vaults. She giggled childishly and unapologetically as she rushed into the arms of her father. 

"Ah! How is my little pest?" He teased, scooping her up with ease despite his thin frame and twirling her around in his protective embrace. 

"Good. Always good" She answered, electrified by the honesty of her response, "how was work?" 

"Riveting as always," Her mother smiled, and the light stopped dying for half of a second. Her ink-soaked fingers slipped against the lock on the door. 

Like everyone in Pember Hollow, Sage's parents worked in the archive vaults- the second piece of the village that defied its natural aesthetic. Sage hated the ugly, metallic doors that littered the edge of the crater and stole her parents away for hours every day. She could recognise their necessity (the scripts stored in the hidden, underground tunnels were some of the most valuable pieces of literature in existence), but she despised their faces. 

Sage had been inside only one tunnel. Both her parents worked in flora and fauna, copying, and decrypting age-old texts to preserve the secrets of the biological world that they hid between their pages. She visited them here semi-regularly to return or retrieve work for her own studies, but she avoided the dark, musty halls like a badger does the daylight.

"Darling," the woman called, stepping back, and fiddling with the green gemstone that hung continually from her neck in exasperation. 

Sage was lowered to the ground as her father went to her mother's aid. He wrapped his arms around her, guiding the key in her hands with his own as he planted kisses against her soft, brown hair. 

Sage pulled gently at her own, chest aching as she watched them. Really, she wondered, what fool wouldn't want this future?

The lock clicked. The door opened. The hands remained entwined.

"Oh," She gasped, almost forgetting in her contentment, "Tion and I found the first snowdrop today, he's taken it to the Grandmaster, and she should be announcing the feast for the First Bloom soon."

As if on cue a low, steady beat split the night in two. The single blow, which hung in the air with the flocks of birds it had startled from their nests, marked the first season of the new year. Tion had reached the Grandmaster, and she had accepted his snowdrop as the first of spring.

Cheers and shouts erupted from the hole in response to the gong call and the sleepy village came alive with the alacrity of a fuse introduced to a spark. Soon, everyone would be gathered in the square to celebrate the end of winter and the hope that accompanied the coming of spring. A hope that she had nurtured and fed for weeks, and which Tion had been the one to provide. Sage swallowed what saliva she could spare from her dry mouth, and with it her pride. 

"I always knew your running around those woods would come in handy eventually." Her mother was impossibly more beautiful in the glowing radiation of her pride. 

Sage stifled a laugh, suppressing it until her parents had dipped inside and left her alone. 

"Are you coming?" They called from within. 

"Not yet, I'll see you tonight at the feast." Sage had become inspired. 

Tion was an adventurer but he was no forester. Their escapades together in the trees throughout their teenage years had not been a bonding session with nature, but with each other and with friends. Sage remembered their adventures fondly and had thought very suddenly of a way in which she might make this celebration even better.

Sage was smart. She spent hours each week examining and studying her parents' trade. She could identify the best soil type for every style of crop and knew their names in every language on the continent. She knew which roots could be used as dyes, which pollen had the ability to blister the lungs upon inhalation, and which leaves could be shredded, packed, and smoked in a carved wooden pipe.

Tion was clever. He knew how to make and where to hide such a pipe. If she hurried, she could be back even before he was. 

\-------------------------------------------------------

Deep in the haven of the trees, Sage found the tiny clearing that came alive with memories every time she entered it. To most, the trees would look the same here as they did across the rest of Eronite, but Sage was not most. She had gone north, where the moss was darker and the trees grew more closely together, huddling closer like penguins the more the climate grew temperate. There would be no grass here, no snowdrops like she had found further south. Instead, would be something even better. 

She sank to her knees to search for the fluffiest buds, which the undergrowth hid desperately under its flat, open leaves. When the chest pocket of her juniper tunic was full of her gatherings and her heart warm with anticipation for the events that awaited her return, she lifted her eyes to the sky. 

The sun was gone, leaving only a purple canvas punctured in pieces by flecks of navy cotton. Cirrocumulus, she noted. Sage granted herself a moment to stare at the patches of sky that evaded the clouds and the canopy and began to make her own constellations with the stars she could see. An elephant with a lopsided ear. A fern leaf. A triangular formation that, if Sage pictured it with her eyes shut tight, would glow green like her mother's pendant. 

It was then, with her eyes closed and her mind drifting aimlessly and unfocused that she first noticed the smell. The wet, earthy tone of the moss and the sickly-sweet aroma of freshly exposed sap, but below that was something else. Something new. An acrid, smoky stench that Sage could only associate with the smell of her father's jacket when he returned from lantern duty.

When her eyes shot open, still aimed at the sky, Sage registered distantly that she could no longer see any stars at all because the sky had very suddenly become filled with a kind of cloud that she had never studied.

For the second time that harrowing day, the girl was running, the girl was screaming. If she had ever moved quickly in her life, it was not quickly enough. This time though, she had no flower in hand, no one tearing through the trees behind her. They were all waiting. 

The trees were too tight. They held her back, slowing her down as if begging her not to go. She wished she could scream them all down and see clearly ahead so that she could know what awaited her. Her breathing was haggard from more than exertion and she was choking on air that became staler with every step. But of course, she wouldn't notice this. She would notice nothing but her stupidly slow feet and the growing dispersal of the trees that meant she was getting closer. 

The girl was home, or as close to it as she would ever be again.

The hollow where she had been born; where she had grown up; where her life had begun every morning and ended every night for the last nineteen years, was simply no longer there.

In its place was a fiery, orange demon ripping through the cracked cobblestone streets, licking its edge, desperate to spill out and rip through the forest to fulfil its insatiable hunger for destruction. The inferno filled her every crevice. Falling ash tickled her skin, singing her with tiny flecks of misery where it landed. There was no longer the element of oxygen in the chemical composition of the air, only blackness and hate. Smoke seeped through every pore like droplets absorbed by the earth after a colossal rainstorm. Despite every nerve, every fibre of her being begging her not to, Sage had to breathe. Her lungs continued to fill with a continuity that cast her into a festering pit of self-loathing.

Sage had never smelled real, exposed fire until now and so she could not tell that the acidity in the air was not carbon monoxide, but the scent that accompanies the evaporation of human flesh. She felt her chest tighten both from lack of oxygen and simple terror, her blood seemed to constrict in her every artery, and she wondered if she cut herself open what she would find flowing in its place.

She could not be certain in her state of hysteria that, had she not been stopped by a physically oppressive wall of blinding heat, she would not have jumped into the blaze herself. As it was, she could go no farther than the protection that the treeline allowed. Beyond it was impassable to all those who were not made of destruction themselves and Sage, for now, was not. She could do nothing but watch, inhaling ashes and exhaling raw horror, as the inferno raged on.

There comes a point when the body simply cannot function without satisfactory levels of oxygen. At this point, it shuts down. From then, one of two things will happen. One: Consciousness is lost until oxygen levels become normalised, whereupon the system restarts and returns to its biological norm. Or, two: Consciousness is lost so that the mind does not have to watch its body die, for without the return of oxygen, it will die. 

Sage was as close to the edge as the heat would allow of her feeble, human skin- choking both on tears and the vaporisation of the people who had shown her what it meant to be loved- for longer than the body would ordinarily allow before it granted her collapse. A kind access to the pathway of death.


	2. two,

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> enter the himbo

Sage woke up. She knew this because it was the only logical explanation for her consciousness and not because she felt awake at all. She knew that her body was immobile and that her mind had ceased to produce independent thoughts, although it was difficult to assess how much of this particular development could be attributed to her state of consciousness.

Passed out, she was a carcass on the forest floor.

Awake, she was a carcass on the forest floor. 

The skies faded in and out of their colours but each one seemed to carry a permanent tint of grey now. At one point, on the second day maybe, she stretched a hand towards it just to see if the nerves still responded to her will. They did. The fingers, black with soot or dirt or both, made the blue hues between them glow brighter. She let the hand fall. 

It took three days for the fire to choke itself of its own vitality and four for Sage to recover hers. In the final day, she regained awareness of the world. For the first half of the morning, it rained. Droplets, fat and kind from their collection in the overhanging canopy, threw themselves from the arrow-headed leaves, tumbled through the compact air and sank through the layers of her skin. Her body absorbed the water faster even than the mossy ground and Sage parted her cracked lips to greet it. Stray beads lingered on the skin, and as Sage watched them mark their silver snail trails down her bare arms, she could not blame them for refusing to sink and be corrupted in the toxic channels flowing beneath it. The ones that had entered her, she mourned with selfish thanks. 

Here, she said to her blood, is oxygen. Now you are clean again. 

On the second half of the final day the rain stopped, but its effect lingered with an arrogant stubbornness. The woods once again smelled like the one thing that would not catch a spark. Creatures surfaced to soak in the purified atmosphere. Worms pushed up through the dirt, wiggled like half dead things around her fully alive legs and turned away from her with disinterest. A deer appeared; half hidden between a thicket of trees a few feet away. Like the worms it turned its head to her with the grace of a thousand gods, assessing the danger. Sage waited, still as an unturned stone, for the prey to run from this obvious predator. For a long time, it simply stared at her crumpled form with its beautiful, big, brown eyes. Eventually, the eyes dropped, and the beast continued grazing. No danger here, it said. 

If Sage could have cried, she would have done so now. Never in her life had she hated an animal. Never had she done anything but protect the forest and everything in it, but what had they done for her? Outlasted her village and now dared to challenge the natural hierarchy because this sole survivor, weak and battered and empty, was barely deserving of pity, how could it instil fear? Sage had used the village hunting bows like everyone else, but never on anything that was not made of straw. If she had one now, she would put an arrow through that beautiful, big, brown eye. 

Sage screamed for a very long time, even after the deer bolted. She felt every note ripping like an empty ink pen through ancient, crumbling parchment as they tore through her throat. Eventually the paper walls split, and she stopped, but the action seemed to have awoken her and she found with bitter remorse that she could no longer pretend that her body was not her own. 

For four days she had left it to become a part of the forest. But she had no cellulose in her limbs and wish as she would, the sap in her veins could not be nursed with water alone. A body is still a body without a soul and now, Sages began to demand navigation. It was evolutionary instinct that raised the girl from the dirt, an electrical impulse rather than a sentient decision. A single treeline separated Sage from the hollow. She crossed it before she had decided whether or not she wanted to see what lay beyond. 

The pit, for now it deserved that name, was breath-taking. The sight ripped all of the air that Sage had spent so long filtering right out of her lungs. She saw it now as the birds would see it. What remained was a lake of black rubble, with ripples of grey ash sighing through the sunken pavements. She saw it now as the birds would see it. A puddle or an ocean, it did not matter. It was the same hellscape from every perspective. 

Sage could look no more. There was no entering the crater even if she wanted to do so. Taking a brief step forward, Sage noticed that the ladders had been severed so that the last five feet of freedom could not be ascended. The bank that should have been covered by the final rungs was boasted a collection of deep, vertical incisions. Sage told herself that the banks had always been like this, or that it was an unusual effect from the fire. She could not tell herself that human hands, digging and clawing with a desperation and fortitude that would surely leave them bleeding and stubby, could have done such a thing. 

Sage walked away before her stomach could force up the few drops of rain she had consumed. There was only one other place she had been in her life, and it seemed like the only place to go now. She moved like a spirit tethered to the earth against its will. Along her route she watched her own lips sucking nectar from the stems of flowers, her teeth gnawing at strips of bark, her body trying to survive against all her efforts. When she reached the road, her hands found a thicket of berries by the bank. A thorn pricked her thumb as she swiped greedily at the twigs. Curiously, she admired the swelling bead: Blood, after all. 

\-------------------------------------------

The sun began to melt into the horizon, meaning nothing to Sage. The trees and steep exterior of Pember Hollow sucked the daylight away prematurely and without them Sage was not sure how to tell the time. Around 1700 hours, she guessed by the saturation of the moon. It was around 1700 hours when she first saw the skyline of Eronite. 

Sage had been just once before, but she did not need experience to name the glass towers. Pember Hollow was a printer, storing texts until they had been reproduced, whereupon they were returned to the heart of the literary sector. There were other such villages with similar roles scattered throughout the county, Material production, forestry maintenance. She had even heard of man-made lakes where the villagers would keep and bleed squid for ink. In the end, everything in the county existed for the success of these crystal mountains; the Library of Eronite. 

The rain began again and, after sucking down as much of it from between her fingers as she could, Sage resorted to accepting its cold embrace. She was wet and shivering and clueless as she wandered through the wing-shaped gates. Her destination spelled itself out in her mind with a burning clarity, but her ambition would not be so kind. 

A part of the girl had expected to reach her destination and be met with concern. She would be taken in the arms of faceless bodies that felt warm and familiar. They would cradle her and tell her she would be okay. Once comforted, she would take their offers of food and shelter and wait with a full stomach until her family arrived. 

There were too many faces and none of them warm. As if like lightning, Sage felt an immeasurable weight pulling at her tendons, trying to drag her to the ground. Here was more people than she had ever seen and not a single one of them knew her name. Everyone was dead but no one was mourning. Everything had burned but this glittering glass. It did not make sense that such a monstrosity could occur, and the world would not pause for it. 

She felt like a leaf that had floated into a river and was now being pulled with the current at a pace unnatural to her species. The width, curve and rocks of these streets and the density, energy and volume of the crowds that jostled through them were so much more overwhelming than she was used to. She looked for mud and timber but saw only glass and vine-entangled concrete. She listened for birds or conversational foliage and heard only the bubbling stream. 

Her face hit the rocky path like a freshly chopped oak. At first, she thought she had fainted from the hunger or exertion. But then she noticed the boy standing over her. His lips moved expressively but Sage only heard an irritating white noise. She blinked and focused harder. 

"Help, you have to help me!" His hands grabbed at her tunic, pulling her up so quickly that her vision lagged. "Please, take me to your house. Hide me." 

My house. 

The words drove into her chest and the images that came with them impaled her completely. The sensation was made worse by looking at the speaker. He was taller than her, about the same height as her brother and with the same lean physique. 

"Wha-" The sentence would never be completed. 

Two men erupted from the crowds on either side of him and pounced like starved lions. What followed was a blur of swinging limbs and between them, flashes of steel. Sage stumbled backwards in shock. She had play fought with other children growing up, but victory was always obtained when the other was pinned to the floor. There was no such innocent determination in the chaos before her. This was a hurricane charged with a violent intent that she had never bourn witness to. Sage did not understand the concept of combat, she never had the need, but her first taste was ugly and sharp on her tongue. 

She tore her eyes from the scuffle, looking for somewhere to run. The streets had emptied as quickly as if a stopper had been opened in the ground and sucked everything clean out. She could not melt into the cracks of the cobblestone and so there was nowhere to hide. She longed again for the safe obstruction of trees. 

"Sorry about that." 

She turned back. The boy was tugging at the sleeve of his tunic, a deep purple thing that had been torn at the shoulder. A man was laid out at each of his feet, both with dark welts on their foreheads. The boy stood above them, no taller than six feet and yet scraping the sky. He held two knives in the hand by his side. There was no blood. 

Sage was running. She did not know where to go and even if she did, she would never have found it. The landscape was entirely new and all of it completely indistinguishable from the rest. Still, she weaved and darted through every side-street she met. A quick right here, straight on, two consecutive lefts. The city was a maze, but Sage was not seeking its centre, only some kind of respite between the suffocating walls. 

Sage knew from the very first step that something was wrong. Each planted foot hit the ground like an iron mallet, conducting the shock of impact throughout her body rather than absorbing it. The lag between her mental processes and her eyesight returned almost as soon as she sucked in her first breath. She had consumed a single meal from the diet of a new-borne rabbit and used it to fuel the distance of a migrating flock. It came as no surprise then, when her energy depleted completely, and she tasted the pavement for the second time that day. What did surprise her was the shadow that drenched the ground almost immediately around her. 

"Please," She begged from the floor. It was the first time in days that she had formed words and they did not fit into the air the way she was used to. 

This time the boy did not pull her to her feet. She was not sure she could have stayed on them if he had. Instead, he sank to the ground and lay down beside her, his head resting on his folded hands. 

"Thank you for your help back there. I truly think it made all the difference." 

She answered only in empty, ragged breaths and so he continued, more gently, "I'm sorry if I scared you. I truly didn't mean for it. I don't have any intention of hurting you."

Sage would not be so trusting.

"You hurt those men."

"Barely. And I did what I had to. They would have done worse to me if I had allowed them." He untucked one hand, pointing to the knives he had taken from their bodies that now rested in his belt. 

"What do you want then, if not my body?" 

Worms could not stand the sight of her and this angelic face belonged to something greater than worms. Sage looked at him intently, determining the danger he posed. If Tion had been a jaguar, this was a puma. Unfamiliarly golden and curious, he did not feel like her brother. But those glittering teeth that commanded her attention, they were the same. And they were blunt. 

The wildcat looked right back, seeing what Sage herself could not: A broth steamed by the rain so that the blood and dirt had created its own complexion. Beneath this, a girl with cheekbones so hollow he wondered that his voice did not echo back at him when he spoke to her. The assumption that he could want to harm something so helpless both offended him and broke his heart in equal parts. His next words were a temptation, but they did not lack honesty. 

"I just want a friend." 

Given the circumstances that had led to their meeting, it was not clever to accept such companionship. But of course, Sage was not clever. She was inconceivably drained, and her heart had not even begun to comprehend the fractions that it lay in. Here was a whole one, offering itself to her with her brothers smile. 

"You have peculiar taste." The other words she let die at the edge of her mind, I have nothing to give, but I would give it all for the same thing. 

The former was enough for the boy. Sage could not find it in herself to speak anything else, so he did this for them both. The stars came out and as they lay together, he named the ones he could see. Sage knew the stars too. She did not correct his mistakes because he had also named himself Robben and even though his identifications were not always without error, she liked the way he spoke them. 

There, she fell asleep to the sound of his voice and even suspected that she may have missed its absence, but he never provided it. When she awoke, Sage found that she had been moved to a quieter walkway. Robben sat opposite her so that their heels almost touched, offering a plate of warm bread and dried fruit. Sage questioned the legality with which he had acquired the meal but swallowed her suspicions alongside every heavenly mouthful. 

She quickly learned that rules applied to Robben the way they applied to stray dogs. He told her that he was from Thronford where he had broken some of them and was being pursued half-heartedly by the capital's men as a result. Counties were governed by their Arch, or leader, and most injustices were managed internally. No Arch had power outside their county, except for Thronford; the sovereign region of the Empress. She did not usually concern herself with district matters, so to be chased by royal guards meant that Robben had committed an offence serious enough to break Continental law. 

He never confirmed what exactly this was, and Sage did not ask. She found that she cared less about his past and more about the ways he made her present bearable. This he did more infinitely than she had imagined could be possible. Robben stole, but only to provide her with untattered shoes and freshly fried food. He trespassed so that she could sneak into private baths and turned his back while she did so. He did not kill men who attacked him with daggers. 

She still did not know exactly why he had chosen her, but Sage developed a tenderness towards him regardless. The kind that can only be felt for a stranger. Their attachment was not founded on debt or obligation and therefore could not be burdened. At any second, either could disappear without a word and dissolve into nothing but a curious story. Yet every morning that Sage awoke, Robben was there across from her with a story to tell or knife trick to show her. 

She knew nothing of him except for the scattered pieces of his history that had led to their convergence. This, and that if there a came a morning when he was not there, she would hold the lines of his face in her memory forever, greeting every resurgence of its image with a spark of pleasure. Of her, he knew nothing at all except that as long as he had no destination, she would be it. In the same intuitive way, she had known to trust him, she knew this of him too. 

Armed with this understanding, she did not flinch away when the inevitable question was asked. The sun had rose and set five times since their first meeting, and the two were back in the alley they had transformed into a camp. Sage was relacing her new boots. Robben twisted a knife expertly between his fingers like a spinning top, casual and deadly. 

"I'm getting concerned that I'm boring you." He piped up suddenly, letting the knife spin to a stop in his fist, "All I talk about is stories from home. Do you ever intend to tell me where that is for you?"

She wondered how to answer him. Lying would come easily, more easily than the truth. But he was so solid, both in stature and confidence, and she was so weary with carrying this burden alone. She finished the laces and pulled her knees into her chest. He watched her patiently. 

"Home is nothing. A nearby village called Pember Hollow. It's the same thing." 

"Sage?" He encouraged her, leaning forward. How could she resist now? He had used her name. 

She told him everything. First, she mentioned her brother, and how Robben reminded her distantly of him. He smiled at that, the beautiful, homely grin. She moved on, hoping every second that maybe he would stop her but wishing even harder that he would let her give this piece of herself away. 

She talked about the flower. The feast, the fire, the rubble that remained. He did not smile again. The only piece she emitted was the smell. It was indescribable and anyway, she sensed that he had noticed the traces of it that lingered in her keratin, hungry to haunt the dish it had failed to consume. He was silent. She knew he was watching her, but she could not look at him to confirm. 

"I've never heard of such a tragedy. The word is too small for it."

And now the revelation that Sage had not even voiced to herself. She thought its utterance would kill her, perhaps it was why she allowed it. She looked up. 

"It was not a tragedy." 

Reflected in the glassy blue eyes of concern, she saw fingernail scratches in banks. The systematic severance of the ladders. She turned her head slightly to hide her tears and caught the stench of her hair. 

"The exits were blocked. There was a gas in the air that I did not recognise. The fire was uncontrollable, but somehow contained. I do not know why, but it was a massacre. Intentional." 

It was morning. There were a million sounds in the city and not one of them entered that alley. 

"Why?" 

"How can I know? We copied books. We had no warriors or criminals. It was a village of scholars and their children, no one that deserved to die."

"Who else survived?"

She shook her head. A tear splashed into her lap, but she felt no embarrassment, they were falling from his eyes too. "I walked the road here. There were tracks but mine were the only human. No one else got out."

"Only you..."

She hesitated. "I question it sometimes. It was chance that I was in the forest, but so much of me belonged there that now, I think all that remains is the parts so terrible that death himself did not want them."

"You're wrong." He stood up, heat radiating from him in angry waves. "I may not know all of you, but the bits that I know are better than the bad could ever be. You are good and kind."

"I was. They took that from me." She paused, testing the waters, "why didn't you kill those men?"

"Simple. They didn't deserve it. They are doing their duty, no matter how inconvenient it may be for me. They hunt me as a criminal, but the only thing that would make that true is my retaliation. I do not deal in cold blooded murder." 

Of course, what had she expected? He was solid in everything and justice was no exception. 

"But this," he continued, crouching down and taking her hands, "for this I would freeze every vessel."

It should not have brought such comfort. 

Sage remembered her last memory of Pember Hollow, that crispy expanse that she had once longed to be a part of. She saw the last wisps of smoke filtering into the atmosphere and taking with them the peaceful future she had imagined for herself. She no longer had the intention of living a long and fulfilling life, there was a new path before her now.

Her family was innocent and clean, and she decided that she was willing to accept that she would never hold them again. They would have no reunion in whatever afterlife existed because she would not be sent there. Instead, she would enter the gates of hell in step with the creators of this atrocity. 

"What will you do?" The kindest thief she would ever meet asked her. 

There was no hesitation in her response. She had spent four days half-dead in a forest dreaming of nothing else. 

"Find them, first of all. And then, I do not know for certain. But when I leave, it will be waving goodbye with their blood on my hands." 

The words fit into the air as if they had been forged for each other.


End file.
